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Which Market Is Most Important to Publishers?

1/20/09

Silly? A bit pointless? Sure. So sue me.

Looking at Famitsu software sales data for games released between January 20, 2001 and January 20, 2009, here are the top 10 games. Coincidentally, these are the 10 games from that time period which passed 3 million sales.

A few things of note. One, the bigger games are more recent. If we were to split this up by term, only 2 of the 10 would be in Bush's first term; the remaining 8 would be in the second term. Two, Nintendo/Pokémon do dominate the list. Square Enix's Dragon Quest VIII is the odd man out. Three, DS in particular rules the list with 6 of the 10; I guess it's heavily responsible for that second term tilt. Four: These games account for about 43 million sales. Though not every sale is captured on a Famitsu list that I see, that seems to account for about 10% of total sales of games released in that time frame.

Note that since we don't get Famitsu numbers until a few weeks after they happen, and we haven't seen the 2008 Top 100 yet, the final numbers will be a bit different. While I'm confident these will still be the Top 10, some of these are close enough that orders might change in those few weeks.